Artsy

Getting Better at Being Terrible

Posted by on March 1, 2011 at 6:25 pm

For a long time, I’ve prided myself on the things I’m good at. Growing up, I regarded myself as a skilled tennis player, a good student, and — later in my youth — a decent actor. School aside, “good” — it turned out — was entirely relative. Truthfully, I mostly played tennis against people as [...]

Writing Lessons Learned from TV: Damages S1

Posted by on February 4, 2011 at 6:01 pm

I am a television fan, a fan of good stories, and of good writing. More than in any feature film, television characters engage me and draw me in. And it’s those characters and the time spent with them that have provided the most emotional responses from me of any visual media (film, theatre, web series, [...]

Red-Lining the Amazon Studios Agreement (Part 2)

Posted by on November 21, 2010 at 3:57 pm

In this post, I’ll take a look at the Amazon Studios approach to collaboration. According to the website, when you post a script to the Amazon Studios server, you open that script up to unlimited revisions by members of the Amazon Studio community. The blue-sky motivation for this approach seems to be to allow other [...]

Red-Lining the Amazon Studios Agreement (Part 1)

Posted by on November 19, 2010 at 6:00 am

This week Amazon launched Amazon Studios, a crowd-sourced approach to creative collaboration and movie making. Writers and filmmakers are invited to post their scripts and “test films”, with the potential to have others work on them, win money, and possibly have their film produced. There are going to be a hundred blog posts complaining about [...]

All Work and No Play is Why AMC’s “Rubicon” Won’t See Season Two

Posted by on November 16, 2010 at 8:00 pm

All work and no play is why AMC’s “Rubicon” won’t see season two. Or at least that’s my amateur assertion. I was rooting for it. After having been spellbound by “Mad Men”, three-year Emmy winner for Best Drama, I have an implicit trust in the production quality and level of story craftsmanship that AMC promotes. [...]